


Embracing the B

by scioscribe



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Bisexuality, F/F, Gender or Sex Swap, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-09
Updated: 2013-08-09
Packaged: 2017-12-22 22:20:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/918694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The advantage of Jell-O shots and Gay/Straight Alliance booths, the benefits of communities, the probability of messiness, the importance of mouthwash, and the emotional significance of acronyms, or, five times Jess Winger kissed Britta Perry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Embracing the B

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the ficathon, so thanks to biohazardgirl for getting me to pinch-hit (and saying she liked it!), and thanks to my proposed gift recipient for suggesting a gender-swapped Jeff with or without "pursuing an ostensibly straight Britta." I went with "with."
> 
> Warnings for discussion of homophobia; also, Jeff in any universe or form is obsessed with appearing "cool," so Jess has some opinions at the beginning of the story about the queer community that shouldn't be read as mine (and she grows of them anyway).

**1**

Greendale’s freshman orientation had a Gay/Straight Alliance booth and free Jell-O shots; Jess went because she hadn’t gotten laid in months.

Her last semi-regular hookup had disappeared when she saw the pile of unpaid bills Jess had been shoving under the sofa. Jess hadn’t been attached, but she missed sex. She had always been proud of not having Pride—she’d worn tailored suits with the hemline neat against her thigh and she’d been a _lawyer_ , one more shark in the sea with blood on her teeth, and she didn’t need any community. Community was for women who couldn’t get laid without soft lighting and an assurance that, yes, the chick across the bar was looking at them. The way Jess figured it, sex was like golf: fuck the handicap they were trying to give her.

She had made it her sexual business to seduce fellow associates. Someone else’s clients. On one memorable occasion—and she didn’t usually go for older women—a judge. And she’d done it all with an outstretched leg and a smile, a stocking-seam drawn down her calf to her wholly impractical heels. She’d done it by reading cues: a flush, lowered eyelashes, a lean in.

But without a job, she wasn’t _meeting_ anyone, or not enough people on a regular basis to work her magic.

So she swallowed her pride, got some Pride, and went to Greendale ahead of schedule.

“Welcome to Greendale!” the living embodiment of Pride said. “I’m Dean Pelton, and wow, I have to tell you, those are just some terrific shoes. It’s a _night_ for that.” He peered at her. “What size are you, about a nine, nine-and-a-half?”

“Eight-and-a-half,” Jess said automatically. Winger womanhood was about never giving your real weight, your real height, your real age, or your real shoe size—her mom had taught her that, before despairing of all those lessons as useless when Jess came out, like she’d admitted to liking plaid as well as pussy.

What Jess had learned from her mom: it was one thing to be a lesbian, but it was another thing to be herself.

What Jess had learned from her dad: there was something unlovable about her.

She blinked: the dean had her foot balanced in his hand.

“No,” he was saying, “definitely a nine—but we’ll keep that between us. So: one nine, and one eight. I’m at _least_ a ten, but what a little touch of stocking and a reasonable tolerance for pain won’t do for you—”

“Who’s the eight?”

“Britta Perry. GSA booth.” He leaned forward. “She’s the very enthusiastic S, but, you know, good luck with that.”

She didn’t like being pegged so easily, just by a question: it felt like her bra strap peeking out through the neck of her shirt. She nodded on autopilot and went on to the rainbow-spattered GSA table, where she found the size eight feet in black leather boots with stacked heels.

They belonged to the best reason for attending Greendale: a woman a little younger than her, with artfully disarrayed blonde hair, ice-chip blue eyes, tight jeans, and the faint dimple of a former nose piercing. Jess stroked her thumb against her hip and thought about the other woman’s—Britta’s—mouth. She also thought about how her number one rule for not making herself ridiculous was the rule to leave straight girls alone.

She’d had one drunken, tequila-scorched kiss with a straight friend at law school. Kissed back because she hadn’t noticed the camera the straight friend’s straight guy crush was aiming at them. The next day, it had been all, _oh, Jess, I just like you as a friend_ , like Jess had been the one to initiate it, that clumsy push together and her friend hanging off her lower lip by her teeth, like a dog with a bone. She’d given up straight friends the way she’d given up gay bars: people who needed other people were the worst kind of people.

Britta Perry was straight _and_ the community organizer type, the one who thought three viewings of _Brokeback Mountain_ and ten minutes of _But I’m a Cheerleader_ caught on IFC while channel-surfing meant she could tell Jess how to be a lesbian. The single worst decision Jess could make would be to hit on her.

“There really should be a B,” she said. “In the sign. GBSA.” She looked at the long shape of Britta’s body, bent only slightly at the waist, her legs out diagonally to the ground. “Sometimes people are bi.”

Britta spread her hands at Jess, like Jess had offered her free drinks or something: “Yes! That’s what I’ve been saying all night! And lesbians, you can’t forget about lesbians.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Jess assured her.

“And questioning, intersex—it really needs to be QUILTBAGSA. I’ve been Googling it.”

Jess felt like the conversation wasn’t going the way she wanted it to, and neither was the night, and neither was her life, so she said, “Want a Jell-O shot?” and fished two off a platter as someone carried it by. Odds were he wasn’t a waiter, but hey, live dangerously. She offered one to Britta.

Three Jell-O shots later, Britta was blearily saying, “You have, like, the best nose. Of all noses,” and Jess, with three shots swirling around in her stomach with only three doses of lime-flavored gelatin to try and absorb them, thought that was as good as she could hope for. She leaned in. Britta’s mouth was warm, and beneath the shots, she tasted like spearmint gum and cigarettes. Jess had always had a thing about smokers, liking them even though everyone else said she couldn’t have. She turned her head, fitting their mouths together perfectly. Britta’s skin smelled like peaches.

“Wow,” Britta said, when she pulled away. “Okay. I’m—I’m straight, though,” and then she threw up on Jess’s shoes.

The dean said he didn’t want them anymore.

“Too much work,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” Jess said.

**2**

The second time Jess kissed Britta, it was just to get an A in accounting.

Britta still tasted like cigarettes, but now she also tasted like a dentist’s office: oppressive sterile and overdone with Listerine.

“I know a life-changing kiss when I see one!”

Britta smirked. “He thinks I just gave you your Katy Perry moment. You know, according to Pierce, I’m the one who looks like a lesbian.”

“You’re an activist who hangs out with the living embodiment of oppression. Correction. Barely-living.” Her lips still burned with mouthwash. “Did you _prep_ before you kissed me?”

A faint pink edged into Britta’s cheeks. She scoffed. “ _Sha_. Like I could have known Whitman would walk by.”

“Right,” Jess said. “You couldn’t have. Kind of my point.”

“You’ve got a pretty big ego for someone who almost flunked the easiest class at Greendale.”

Britta was straight, that was the thing: Britta was straight, so she dated Vaughn, and she showed his poetry to Jess like Jess didn’t have the right to care about it when she felt like she was still brushing Britta’s Virginia Slims out of her mouth. Britta was straight, she said, one hundred percent except for that crush in high school and girls on TV and Catherine Zeta-Jones in _Chicago_. Britta was straight, unless she’d been drinking. Britta swigged half a bottle of mouthwash to kiss a good second impression onto Jess, but hey, they were just friends, and that was what friends did, wasn’t it?

Which was why, Jess thought while she watched Britta walk away again, it was a bad idea to have friends.

**3**

“You could stay with me, Jessica,” Shirley said, with the sort of delicate emphasis on Jess-i-ca—splitting her into more manageable parts—that implied that Jess had better not take advantage of her Christian hospitality by making heathenish lesbian love in her house. Shirley’s stance on the girls Jess had picked her up had mostly amounted to a wrinkled nose and a sigh that she was corrupting Britta—“You think?” Jess had said, too hopefully—but Jess didn’t want to take the chance that she’d wake up for delicious Shirley-waffles and step on an Exodus Ministry pamphlet slid under her door. So: pass.

“Or me,” Pierce said, with the sort of eyebrow-waggling that indicated that Jess _damned well better_ make heathenish lesbian love in his house. So: double, triple, a hundred times pass.

Troy’s dad was racist—“And he’s probably going to hit on you,” Troy said. “Even though you’re older than his girlfriend”—and Annie couldn’t ask her parents for favors.

That left Britta and Abed.

Abed’s pitch involved bunk beds. Britta’s involved—staring somewhere above Jess’s head while whistling.

So Jess moved in with Abed. It had the feel of a spin-off, but when Abed gave up trying to rope her into quirky hijinks for their pilot episode, they both just sunk into the couch cushions and started watching _Justice League_.

“I dressed as Wonder Woman for three straight Halloweens,” Jess said through a mouthful of mint chocolate chip ice cream. “And if we’re keeping tabs on how far away I am from having an invisible jet, let’s just say that I’ve lost track of my calorie count, I’m wearing sweatpants, and I’m living in a college dorm that _already has someone in it_.”

“Wonder Woman’s life wasn’t perfect,” Abed said. “She just kept fighting. And wearing swimwear in all climates, no matter what anyone thought about her.”

“I care about what people think of me, Abed. I can’t help it.”

He pointed at her. “You care about what Britta thinks.”

“Yeah, sure, her too.” She slouched lower, her hair rubbing against the back of her neck—when was the last time she’d washed her hair? She could justify her fear of dorm showers.

Abed tilted his head at her.

The next day, Britta came in and threw a pair of hand-carved Italian faucets smack into Jess’s stomach. (Jess would look at the bruises for days.) She went off on a rant about how Jess didn’t look like herself—Jess never knew what she looked like, anyway—and how everyone wanted to think that lesbians had layers and hidden depths but _intro level queer theory had misled her_ , and Jess didn’t.

“You are all hair product and overpriced clothes and, and, and that perfume, that really expensive perfume that just smells like silk. Okay? That’s _you_. And it was a _mistake_ on my part to think that adversity would make you into a better person.”

Jess licked her finger and curled a strand of her hair.

“You _like_ me all rumpled and you have a very specific way of describing what I smell like.”

“Jess,” Britta said, “go get an apartment,” but she bent down, Jess eye-level suddenly with her breasts—her cleavage shading peach-to-pale because Britta didn’t believe in subjecting herself to skin cancer twice a week like Jess, a sweet smell of perfume and sweat—and then she brushed her lips just lightly, barely, against Jess’s.

“Who builds _your_ character?” Jess called after her, and got a raise middle finger behind Britta’s back as a response.

**4**

The fourth time Jess kissed Britta was right before she went on a date with Slater.

Michelle Slater was the woman Jess would have dated if she’d stayed a lawyer. Polished, dressed to the nines, bitterly sarcastic about everything but sex. Didn’t understand the appeal of Jess’s study group. Jess could have slid one foot slightly loose of her shoe in a meeting and caught her like a fish on a hook if she’d been in Alan’s office.

At Greendale, she had to work for it, and she had to work twice as hard after Halloween, when she’d let a squirrel, Batman, Michael Jackson, Urkel, a skeleton, and the Beastmaster talk her out of perfectly good pity-sex. Britta, she sometimes felt, would be easier—she didn’t know why she thought that, because Britta was never easy, not even in Jess’s head with her hand between her legs was Britta easy, even their fantasy-sex a negotiation of teeth and tongue and clothing clasps, Britta’s slightly chapped lips against her nipples, Britta debating the feminism merits of who did what and when. But Britta would be easy, all the same, because Britta had seen Jess with ice cream stains on the collar of her secret flannel bathrobe and Britta’s judgments of everything made each individual proclamation light and bearable. Britta would understand freaking out and Britta would understand spacing out. Britta wouldn’t, Jess thought, make her _strive_ , like getting into bed was an arcade prize with this many tickets required.

Then again: what Jess didn’t have to try for, with Michelle? Getting the acknowledgment that Michelle would consider having sex with her at all. Facebook profile: Interested in Men and Women. Done.

Britta’s Facebook profile: no picture, and one line saying, “I don’t believe in Facebook.”

There was only so long Jess could hang around asking if she was _sure_ she didn’t like women, because asking that too much made her either an idiot or an asshole, and she didn’t want to be the first and she was sick of being the second.

Somehow she ended up complaining to the dean about this while she was letting him sort through a box of shoes she was trying to sell.

“Three times is a lot of times to kiss someone you don’t like,” she said. “Is all I’m saying.”

He held up a pair. “These are nice. You’re just giving these away? I bet they’re great with your ankles, you know, I try, but I just don’t have the leg.”

“Water-stain on the heel, I’ll give them to you for sixty.”

“Done,” the dean said. “You know, Jessica, snobbery over a little flaw or two never helped anyone.”

“Yeah. She’s straight and I should just overlook it.”

“You,” Craig Pelton said, “oversimplify things to a degree that I just _do not_ understand.” He stood up in the heels and stuck out his leg admiringly. Jess nodded. “Britta will figure things out. No one said you have to wait for her. If you want to, that’s about you, not her. Do you think yes to hose with this, or no?”

“No, bare,” Jess said, and then she went to help Britta stick up posters for the latest thing she was protesting. Something about wetlands, with a note that Shirley’s brownies and Annie’s homemade lemonade would be served. People would come just for that, which was good—Jess had developed a weird allergy to seeing Britta embarrassed. She hoped it didn’t last.

So they did that for an hour and then they ended up in the student lounge, with Jess’s fingers smelling like Scotch tape and warm, freshly Xeroxed paper. Britta had a Band-Aid on her right thumb. Jess thought about flaws and about her mom asking her if she was going to start dressing like a construction worker. Britta wore plaid sometimes, and heavy boots, boots that made her almost as tall as Jess and gave her weight to stomp on what she didn’t like.

“I have a date,” Jess said.

Britta’s face fell, just slightly, just a centimeter, and the she raised her eyebrows goofily. “Oh, yeah?” she said, like they were just playing around, and they kissed again. When she drew back, she said, looking somewhere over Jess’s shoulder, “Do you still have a date _now_?”

Jess thought about what the dean had said, about whether she wanted to wait or not, and she thought about whether she’d rather be an idiot who waited for the woman she maybe sort of loved or an asshole who didn’t.

“Yeah,” she said, and stood up, and for once made Britta watch her leave. It wasn’t as satisfying as she’d hoped.

**5**

They were both streaked with paint and Jess’s stomach was bleeding.

Britta said, “I can patch that up for you,” and her hair was falling into her eyes, and all Jess could think about was Slater’s perfectly set-up schedule for when they should move in together and when they should talk about what, and how, for all of that, she’d never had Jess’s blood on her fingertips, never been one for mess. Suddenly, Jess felt messy, a woman of untucked tank tops and paint-splattered jeans, a woman with mommy issues and daddy issues, commitment issues and detachment issues.

She and Slater, she realized, would never have worked out. Slater was meant for someone who had gone to college the first time around. Britta—Britta was the thrill of skipping it, of auditioning for _The Real World_ instead, of conning her way in. And then the weirdness of realizing that there were things she did want, after all—work she wanted to put in.

Britta smiled, teeth light against her lower lip, and said, “Shirley’s going to say you corrupted me.”

“Am corrupting you,” Jess said, propping herself up on one elbow. Her skin felt hot and throbbing, every inch of her trying to reach up and sink against Brita, into Britta, some fuck-crazy desire to roll over and throw them both onto the floor. “Present tense.”

Britta shrugged. “Eh.” She seesawed one hand, the hand with Jess’s blood on it.

Jess looked at the paint drying on Britta’s cheek and then, slowly, reached up and moved her thumb against it, a crooked diagonal line.

Britta said, “Sometimes people are bi.”

Jess had kissed a lot of women in her life and she knew the script—she moved her hand from Britta’s cheek to Britta’s shoulder and pulled her close, waiting, a hum of desire on her lips. But Britta balked, shifting back onto her heels.

She smiled. “I’m not done coming out to you yet.”

“Don’t let me interrupt your self-discovery with making out.”

“You can’t just _assume_ that me being bi means I want to have sex with you.”

“No,” Jess said, “I thought you wanted to have sex with me even when I thought you were straight. I thought it was ego, but now I’m thinking I’m just that good-looking.”

“I hate to tell you, but Jo from _Facts of Life_ beat you to the first girl-crush thing.” She hesitated for a second and then said, “You were just a really good reason to figure things out. You’re the first good reason I’ve had in a while, actually.”

This was where Jess was supposed to say something: _I love you_ or _You make me a better person_ or _Why are we still talking?_

But for once in her life, she couldn’t think of anything to say.

Britta put her knees to either side of Jess’s hips and leaned down, her perfect mouth, the perfect messiness of her, an inch away from Jess. Jess had been waiting a year, which was longer than she’d ever waited for anyone, and Britta had thrown away years of silence, which was more than anyone had ever done for her, and it was heavy, like it was going to hurt, but Britta didn’t seem to care, and Jess wasn’t going to be outdone in coolness by a woman with a one-eyed cat.

“We should change it to the QUILTBAGSA next year,” Britta said. “Gotta fit a B in there somewhere, anyway,” and Jess laughed right before Britta kissed her, so that for their fifth kiss, their mouths didn’t exactly fit one against the other, a messiness that was never especially corrected.

Jess’s hands striped smooth lines of paint down Britta’s skin. She thought about the last year.

“I’m fine with QUILTBAGSA,” she said.


End file.
